I briefly looked into this. Of the 22 Fields medalists since 2002, X went to undergrad at elite US universities, Y went to non-elite US universities, and Z went to non-US universities.
Please register your predictions for what numbers should fill X, Y, and Z.
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The answers are 1 (Harvard), 0, and 21, respectively. So the evidence does maybe weakly support investing in elite US universities over non-elite US universities, but pretty weakly. A far more important point seems to be that many people with outlier talent on this dimension are neither American nor come to the US as undergrads.
I’d like to see this foray replicated for metrics of top ex post performance in physics, CS, and entrepreneurship.
Update: I helped Linch collect data on the undergrad degrees of exceptionally successful people (using some of the ex post metrics Linch mentioned).
Of the 32 Turing Award winners in the last 20 years, 6 attended a top 10 US university, 16 attended another US university, 3 attended Oxbridge, and 7 attended other non-US universities. (full data)
Of the 97 Decacorn company founders I could find education data for, 19 attended a top 10 US university, 32 attended another US university, and 46 attended non-US universities (no Oxbridge). (full data)
So it seems like people who are successful on these metrics are pretty spread out across both US/elsewhere and elite/non-elite unis, but concentrated enough that having considerable focus on top US universities makes sense (assuming a key aim is to target people with the potential to be extremely successful).
The concentration gets a bit higher for PhDs for the Turing Award winners (28% at top 10 US universities). It’s also higher for younger Decacorn company founders (e.g., 50% of under-35s in the US at MIT or Stanford) – so that gives some (relatively weak) evidence that concentration at top US universities has increased in the last few decades.
There’s a doc with more details here for anyone interested.
Wow awesome analysis! Haven’t read super carefully just yet but does seem to point in the opposite direction of the evidence I present insofar as it relates to uni CB. I think this would be worth making a normal high-level post! Blame it on me and link this comment if anyone disagrees lol
My only super brief thought, which I don’t think is controversial but I’ll make explicit, is that reverse causality (i.e. Stanford signal->success metric) is one reason you might not want to take this as knockdown evidence in favor of “Ivies select for talent,” though I really don’t have a great guess as to how much this is indeed the case
I briefly looked into this. Of the 22 Fields medalists since 2002, X went to undergrad at elite US universities, Y went to non-elite US universities, and Z went to non-US universities.
Please register your predictions for what numbers should fill X, Y, and Z.
[...]
[...]
The answers are 1 (Harvard), 0, and 21, respectively. So the evidence does maybe weakly support investing in elite US universities over non-elite US universities, but pretty weakly. A far more important point seems to be that many people with outlier talent on this dimension are neither American nor come to the US as undergrads.
I’d like to see this foray replicated for metrics of top ex post performance in physics, CS, and entrepreneurship.
[Shortform version of this comment here.]
Update: I helped Linch collect data on the undergrad degrees of exceptionally successful people (using some of the ex post metrics Linch mentioned).
Of the 32 Turing Award winners in the last 20 years, 6 attended a top 10 US university, 16 attended another US university, 3 attended Oxbridge, and 7 attended other non-US universities. (full data)
Of the 97 Decacorn company founders I could find education data for, 19 attended a top 10 US university, 32 attended another US university, and 46 attended non-US universities (no Oxbridge). (full data)
So it seems like people who are successful on these metrics are pretty spread out across both US/elsewhere and elite/non-elite unis, but concentrated enough that having considerable focus on top US universities makes sense (assuming a key aim is to target people with the potential to be extremely successful).
The concentration gets a bit higher for PhDs for the Turing Award winners (28% at top 10 US universities). It’s also higher for younger Decacorn company founders (e.g., 50% of under-35s in the US at MIT or Stanford) – so that gives some (relatively weak) evidence that concentration at top US universities has increased in the last few decades.
There’s a doc with more details here for anyone interested.
Wow awesome analysis! Haven’t read super carefully just yet but does seem to point in the opposite direction of the evidence I present insofar as it relates to uni CB. I think this would be worth making a normal high-level post! Blame it on me and link this comment if anyone disagrees lol
My only super brief thought, which I don’t think is controversial but I’ll make explicit, is that reverse causality (i.e. Stanford signal->success metric) is one reason you might not want to take this as knockdown evidence in favor of “Ivies select for talent,” though I really don’t have a great guess as to how much this is indeed the case